Mikel Rouse

Zoe Lister-Jones

Cort Garretson

Doug Kastilahn

Jonathan Dee's novel Palladio uncovers the awkwardness of two former lovers becoming coworkers at an avant-garde ad agency. In a new adaptation at Symphony Space, composer Ben Neill and media artist Bill Jones expand on the novel's theme with the premiere of their interactive movie, featuring musicians and video mixed live. Performers Mikel Rouse, Zoe Lister-Jones, and Cort Garretson are digitally transported into an environment created from the ads depicted in the story, as the worlds of music, art, and advertising combine — adding powerful fuel to the ongoing debate over the lines between commerce and culture. (LM, Flavorpill)

From an advertiser’s perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public
to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best
one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work.

But look at the videos H. J. Heinz is getting on YouTube.

In
one of them, a teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream,
then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight
from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and
shaves his face with Heinz’s product. Often the ketchup looks more like
blood than a condiment.

Heinz has said it will pick five of the
entries and show them on television, though it has not committed itself
to a channel or a time slot. One winner will get $57,000. But so far
it’s safe to say that none of the entries have quite the resonance of,
say, the classic Carly Simon “Anticipation” ad where the ketchup creeps
oh so slowly out of the bottle.

Heinz Top This TV Challenge
Entry #138: Dan's Heinz Commercial

Consumer brand companies have been busy introducing campaigns like
Heinz’s that rely on user-generated content, an approach that combines
the populist appeal of reality television with the old-fashioned
gimmick of a sweepstakes to select a new advertising jingle. Pepsi, Jeep,
Dove and Sprint have all staged promotions of this sort, as has
Doritos, which proudly publicized in February that the consumers who
made one of its Super Bowl ad did so on a $12 budget.

But these
companies have found that inviting consumers to create their
advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than
just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many
entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them
requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often
spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.

Some
people, meanwhile, have been using the contests as an opportunity to
scrawl digital graffiti on the sponsor and its brand. Rejected Heinz
submissions have been showing up on YouTube anyway, and visitors to
Heinz’s page on the site have written that the ketchup maker is clearly
looking for “cheap labor” and that Heinz is “lazy” to ask consumers to
do its marketing work.

“That’s kind of a popular misnomer that,
somehow, it’s cheaper to do this,” said David Ciesinski, vice president
for Heinz Ketchup. “On the contrary, it’s at least as expensive, if not
more.”

Heinz has hired an outside promotions firm to watch all
the videos and forward questionable ones to Heinz employees in its
Pittsburgh headquarters. So far, they have rejected more than 370
submissions (at least 320 remain posted on YouTube). The gross-out
factor is not among their screening criteria — rather, most of the
failed entries were longer than the 30-second time limit, entirely
irrelevant to the contest or included songs protected by copyright.
Some of the videos displayed brands other than Heinz (a big no-no) or
were rejected because “they wouldn’t be appropriate to show mom,” Mr.
Ciesinski said.

Heinz hopes to show more than five of them, if
there are enough that convey a positive, appealing message about Heinz
ketchup, he said. But advertising executives who have seen some of the
entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud
to run on television in September.

“These are just so bad,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive
of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency in New York that is
not involved with Heinz’s contest.

One of the most viewed Heinz
videos — seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times — ends with a
close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan
Thaler saw it, she wondered, “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too
much Heinz?”

Scott Goodson, chief executive of StrawberryFrog, an advertising
agency based in New York, said the shortcomings of contest entries —
not just those for Heinz — refuted predictions that user-generated
content might siphon work away from agencies. “This Heinz campaign,
much like the same ones done by Doritos, Converse and Dodge, only goes
to show how hard it is to do great advertising,” he said.

In a
traditional ad campaign, a client like Heinz will meet with its
advertising agencies to come up with a central idea, often a tagline
like MasterCard’s
“Priceless.” The creative departments then design the ads while the
media planners figure out where they should run. Except for the
occasional focus group, consumers are largely on the receiving end. [read on...]